Video and audio recordings of a drunken driving arrest figure to play a key role in the trial of a former Beaumont police officer accused of blinding a woman with pepper spray.

Enoch Clark is charged with assault under the color of authority, assault with a less lethal weapon, use of force causing serious bodily injury and assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury. The prosecution is seeking an enhancement alleging Clark personally inflicted great bodily injury.

The officer fired a handgun-like device that uses gunpowder to propel pepper spray at a muzzle velocity of 400 mph. Printing on the weapon’s cartridge suggests that it be fired no closer than 1.5 meters, or 5 feet, from the intended target. Clark is accused of firing it only about 10 inches from Monique Hernandez’s face.

In opening arguments Thursday, May 1, attorneys for both the prosecution and defense played portions of the recording from a dashboard camera mounted on a patrol car during the arrest of Hernandez on Feb. 21, 2012.

The grainy, nighttime recording shows Clark attempting to handcuff the woman while another officer stood by and an unseen crowd of angry family members gathered nearby. The other officer repeatedly ordered family members, who at one point thought she had been shot by a stun gun, to stay back.

Deputy Riverside County District Attorney Michael Carney played a portion of the dashboard video showing Clark affixing handcuffs to Hernandez’s left hand and attempting to handcuff her right hand as she faced the car.

She was asking sometimes unintelligible questions about her arrest while Clark can be heard ordering her to stop resisting.

Carney told jurors that the video shows “nothing she did that night justified what was done to her that night.”

Defense lawyer Steve Sanchez played a portion of the video with the sound turned off and then played a combination of recordings from the dashboard camera and audio recorders on the two officers.

In the audio recordings, Clark can be heard saying “Stop resisting” and “stop tensing up.” Hernandez can be heard saying “I’m not resisting.” Voices of what the lawyer said were family members can be heard confronting the officers, while the other officer repeatedly asks them to stay back.

“You can hear the confusion, the chaos,” Sanchez said.

Carney told the jury that Clark initially told a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigator that he had lost his balance while struggling with the woman and fired the JPX pepper spray device while falling backward.

Later, Carney said, Clark changed his story, claiming that he feared for his life and believed the woman was reaching for a weapon. The former officer was “taking advantage” of a search conducted after the arrest in which a box cutter was found in one of Hernandez’s pockets, Carney contended.

Sanchez, the defense lawyer, told jurors that Clark’s training in the use of JPX was “deplorable, the worst kind of training an officer ever received” and that he was told it was “just like OC spray,” a common aerosol pepper spray used by police.

The first witness to testify in the case, former Beaumont policeman Matthew Gepford, who now works as a policeman in Riverside, conducted the 2010 training class in which Clark was instructed on the use of JPX.

As Gepford was testifying, a copy of the power point demonstration he used to teach the class was displayed on a large screen behind the witness chair. In it, he noted, officers were advised to fire the device with the target a minimum of 1.5 meters away.

In a test given at the end of the training session, which was introduced as evidence, Clark correctly answered a question in which he was asked if the minimum firing distance was 1.5 meters away.

Gepford admitted during cross examination that the power point, provided by the manufacturer, did not specify that firing at a closer range was prohibited.

The trial in Riverside County Superior Court is expected to take at least another week.

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